Small robotic platforms are lightweight and therefore are limited in the digging forces they can react, making it difficult to progress very far into soil, particularly hard soil. It has been shown that using a percussive or vibratory shovel on a small robotic arm allows the arm to make significant progress into the soil, where little to no progress was possible using a standard shovel.
Prior art for percussive digging consists of commercially available digging attachments for pneumatic or electric hammers, such as the Hilti TE-S-SPI clay spade. These attachments greatly enhance a user's capability to break up tough soils and even concrete. Such digging attachments include purpose-built passive digging implements, generally resembling shovels, hoes, or rakes.
The disadvantages of the prior art are many. Current percussive digging solutions are much too heavy to be mounted to a small robotic platform, and current digging tools for small robotic platforms do not deliver meaningful digging capability in strong soils. Small robotic platforms are inherently limited in their payload capacity, and their low mass limits the amount of downforce that they can provide for digging. They are too light to push a shovel blade or other implement into soil or other target material, but at the same time they are also too small to support the mass and power needs of a conventional heavy-duty percussive digger. This challenge is amplified for planetary exploration robots, where the reduced gravity of the Moon or Mars provides less available downforce per unit mass.